Nikon Introduces 600×600 mm Substrates for Advanced AI Silicon

Nikon announced that it will begin accepting orders today for its Digital Lithography System DSP-100, a back-end tool purpose-built for the next-gen of advanced semiconductor packaging. The company will deliver the first units during fiscal year 2026. The DSP-100 is specifically designed for panel-level packaging (PLP), a technology that industry leaders such as TSMC, Intel, and Samsung are adopting to overcome the cost and area limitations of 300 mm wafers. Standardized rectangular substrates, already fixed at 510×515 mm, allow more compute chiplets, HBM4 stacks, and I/O dies to be integrated into a single package. Nikon’s engineers pushed the standard further by enabling exposure on glass or resin panels up to 600×600 mm. Key specifications released today show a 1.0 µm line‑and‑space resolution, overlay accuracy within ± 0.3 µm and throughput of 50 panels per hour at the 510×515 mm size.

By eliminating photomasks and instead steering an i-line equivalent light source through a spatial light modulator (SLM), the DSP-100 sidesteps both the optical distortion inherent in large single-lens systems and the expense of mask sets. A proprietary multi‑lens array borrowed from Nikon’s flat‑panel display division stitches the pattern seamlessly across the full substrate. With a 600×600 mm panel accommodating 36 of the 100 mm square packages, the system delivers nine times higher throughput productivity compared to 300 mm wafer processes, dramatically reducing the cost per die. The maskless architecture also shortens design iteration cycles, a critical advantage as generative AI workloads drive rapid evaluation of data center accelerators. Nikon states that volume production of the DSP‑100 will commence in 2026, with pricing disclosed only to qualified buyers.